Bookbeat: August 2010

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective
on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight
millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For
many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has
been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships
between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that
Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout
eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways
that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting
with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral
lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis,
and coalescence--an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions
and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

- Publisher

Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literature and Visual
Culture

The phrase "spatial turns" signals the growing importance of
space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture.
The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together,
for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality,
and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture,
history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies,
and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science
fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural
studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies
of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns
brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature
and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space
by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.

The volume is organized in four sections: “Mapping Spaces” addresses
cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; “Spaces
of the Urban” takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the
city; “Spaces of Encounter” considers how Germany has become
a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and “Visualized Spaces” concerns
the theorization of space in film and new media studies.